March 2026

Hedging, Gender, and Social Positioning in Jane Austen’s Fiction

Adele Hu

Introduction

The project examines how hedging functions across gender and social positioning in Jane Austen’s fiction. Using Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility as the primary corpus, I developed a Python- and NLTK-assisted workflow to extract direct speech and identify candidate hedging markers, which were then manually classified and interpreted in context.

Rather than assuming that hedging is inherently associated with women’s speech, the project asks how linguistic mitigation, uncertainty, politeness, and authority shift across characters, classes, and social situations. The findings suggest that hedging in Austen is better understood as a relational and context-dependent strategy shaped by social position and interactional goals.

This work was presented at the “Conference on Applied Linguistics and Language Studies” at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and at the “Digital Intelligence, Language, Future” forum at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

March 2026

Hedging, Gender, and Social Positioning in Jane Austen’s Fiction

Adele Hu

Introduction

The project examines how hedging functions across gender and social positioning in Jane Austen’s fiction. Using Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility as the primary corpus, I developed a Python- and NLTK-assisted workflow to extract direct speech and identify candidate hedging markers, which were then manually classified and interpreted in context.

Rather than assuming that hedging is inherently associated with women’s speech, the project asks how linguistic mitigation, uncertainty, politeness, and authority shift across characters, classes, and social situations. The findings suggest that hedging in Austen is better understood as a relational and context-dependent strategy shaped by social position and interactional goals.

This work was presented at the “Conference on Applied Linguistics and Language Studies” at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and at the “Digital Intelligence, Language, Future” forum at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

March 2026

Hedging, Gender, and Social Positioning in Jane Austen’s Fiction

Adele Hu

Introduction

The project examines how hedging functions across gender and social positioning in Jane Austen’s fiction. Using Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility as the primary corpus, I developed a Python- and NLTK-assisted workflow to extract direct speech and identify candidate hedging markers, which were then manually classified and interpreted in context.

Rather than assuming that hedging is inherently associated with women’s speech, the project asks how linguistic mitigation, uncertainty, politeness, and authority shift across characters, classes, and social situations. The findings suggest that hedging in Austen is better understood as a relational and context-dependent strategy shaped by social position and interactional goals.

This work was presented at the “Conference on Applied Linguistics and Language Studies” at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and at the “Digital Intelligence, Language, Future” forum at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.